• How is Gentoo pronounced, and what does it mean ?
• What makes Gentoo different?

• What is the difference between the .iso and .tbz2 files?
• Why do the build .iso and .tbz2 files sometimes have different -r (revision) numbers?
• I'm finding things to be really unstable and I'm using "-O9 -ffast-math -fomit-frame-pointer" optimizations. What gives?
• What's the default root password after installation?
• How can I change the root (or indeed any other user's) password?
• How do I add a normal user?
• Why can't a user su to root?
• How do I enable devfs?
• How to I disable devfs?
• How do I get a /dev/mouse that doesn't go away when I reboot (when using devfs)?
• Grub can't find stage x.y?
• My ASUS CUV4X-D won't boot and it freezes during various stages of kernel loading and hardware detection.
• If I have Gentoo 1.4_rc1 can I upgrade to 1.4_rc2/rc3/final without reinstalling?
• My kernel doesn't boot (properly), what should I do now?
• My proxy requires authentication, what do I have to do?

• In what format are the packages stored?
• Why write a new port system (Portage) instead of using BSD's version?
• How does this differ from Debian's apt or BSD's ports?
• How do I install and uninstall packages?
• How can I set a global configuration for compiling packages?
• What happened to /etc/make.defaults?
• Is there a way to upgrade all installed packages e.g. apt-get upgrade or make World?
• When updating a package using emerge or ebuild, how do I avoid clobbering my config files?
• I want to perform the ./configure step myself. Can I?
• What if rsync doesn't work for me?
• How do I use emerge from behind a firewall?
• Can I rsync from another operating system?
• I have only slow modem connection at home. Can I download sources somewhere else and add them to my system?
• .tar.gz sources for installed software are piling up in /usr/portage/distfiles/ using valuable space. Is it safe to delete these files?
• I went to emerge blackdown-jdk and blackdown-jre, and afterwards java-config --list-available-vms would only list blackdown-jre. Openoffice then refuses to emerge. What do I do?
• What's in /var/tmp/portage? Is it safe to delete the files and directories in /var/tmp/portage?

• I have installed openssh on my box, but can only log in as root - my normal user account doesn't work.
• I can start X applications as root only.
• How do I set up an International Keyboard Layout?
• DNS name resolution works for root only.
• Why is KDE not reading /etc/profile?
• Why can't my user use their own crontab?
• How do I get numlock to start on boot?
• How do I have my terminal cleared when I log out?

• ReiserFS and filesystem corruption issues -- how to fix'em, etc...
• How to I view the timestamps in /var/log/syslog.d, etc. on a pre-1.0_rc5 Gentoo system?
• Metalogd doesn't log in real time!

• Where can I report bugs?
• How often are new releases made?
• I would like a package to be added to Portage; how would I go about this?
• How can I add a question or answer to this FAQ?
• make -f Makefile.cvs on a KDE app produces "invalid unused variable" errors. What gives?
• My speaker beeps like crazy while compiling Mozilla. How do I disable console beeps?

• Where can I find more about supervise used by default in Gentoo Linux 1.0_rc5 and earlier?
• Where can I find more information about Gentoo Linux?
• Can I buy a CD of Gentoo Linux?
• Why, when I hit reply to a post on a Gentoo mailing list, does my answer only go to the original poster and not the entire list?
• This FAQ hasn't answered my question. What do I do now?

Gentoo is a species of small fast penguin, pronounced "gen-too" (The "g" in "gentoo" is a soft "g", as in "gentle").

Gentoo Linux is a fast, modern distribution with a clean and flexible design -- in this respect, Gentoo may appeal to Slackware, Linux From Scratch or BSD users. Unlike most Linux distros, Gentoo has a package system reminiscent of BSD's ports, meaning the packages are continually updated to the latest versions.

The build .tbz2 file is a minimal set of system files that is necessary for allowing a user to bootstrap and install Gentoo Linux. The build .iso is a complete, bootable CD image that contains a system kernel, a reasonably complete set of kernel modules, necessary system tools such as mkfs and networking support, as well as the .tbz2 minimal-system tarball. Most users will install Gentoo Linux by burning the .iso file onto a CD, booting off of the CD, and installing from within the minimal linux environment provided by the Gentoo boot CD. It is possible, however, for users to install Gentoo Linux directly from an already-existing Linux distribution. Such users need only download the .tbz2 file, install the contents on a spare partition (making sure to use the p flag when untarring the tarball!), chroot, and install in the usual fashion.

The .tbz2 minimal-system tarball only needs to be revised when there have been significant changes to the core Gentoo Linux system (such as baselayout changes, or a new profile), and as such .tbz2 updates are relatively rare. The .iso file tends to get updated whenever we discover that somebody has hardware that won't boot from our .iso. Since new kernel modules and patches are constantly being generated, this situation probably won't stabilise anytime soon.

Don't bother using anything higher than -O3 since it isn't support by current versions of gcc. Very aggressive optimizations sometimes cause the compiler to streamline the assembly code to the point where it doesn't quite do the same thing anymore. A possible setting based on Loc-Dog (on IRC)'s CFLAGS is -O3 -mcpu=i686 -march=i686 -fforce-addr -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops -frerun-cse-after-loop -frerun-loop-opt -falign-functions=4, which is about as much as I'd want to push global optimization settings. Beyond this, it's best to use ultra-high optimizations only with specific packages where you really need that extra 2%, (eg graphics and various multimedia programs), and where you can easily test the package to ensure that it hasn't been optimized into oblivion.

Please try first to compile with CFLAGS -march= -O2 before reporting a bug.

The default password is blank; hit enter.

You can use passwd to change the password for the user you are logged into. For extra options and setting, please see man passwd once you've completed the install.

The command adduser gentoo will add a user called gentoo. The next step is to give this user a password and passwd will do exactly that.

Instead of adduser you can also use:

# useradd gentoo -m -G users,audio,wheel -s /bin/bash

This will add a user gentoo, will make possible for him to use sound-related devices (/dev/sound/*), will make possible for him to switch to root (using su) and will make /bin/bash his login shell.

You can also install superadduser using emerge superadduser and then issue superadduser gentoo to add a user called gentoo. Just follow the instructions given to you by superadduser.

For security reasons, users may only su to root if they belong to the wheel group. To add a username to the wheel group, issue the following command as root:

# usermod -G users,wheel username

If you're using 1.0_rc5 or greater, you don't need to do anything special to get devfs working; it's already active (you did make sure that devfs was built into the kernel, didn't you?). However, if you are using a version of Gentoo Linux prior to version 1.0_rc5, add devfs=mount to your GRUB kernel boot options so that the line looks something like kernel /boot/boot/bzImage devfs=mount foo=bar The kernel will then mount the /dev devfs filesystem automatically at boot-time.

Under Gentoo Linux 1.0_rc6 and later, you can disable devfs by passing the gentoo=nodevfs to the kernel.

If you are using 1.0_rc6 or later, then you can just use ln -s to make the usual symbolic link from /dev/mouse, and it will be preserved between reboots.

All other users need to edit /etc/devfsd.conf and add these lines:

REGISTER        ^misc/psaux$    CFUNCTION GLOBAL symlink misc/psaux mouse
UNREGISTER      ^misc/psaux$    CFUNCTION GLOBAL unlink mouse

If you are not using the devfs PS/2 mouse /dev/misc/psaux device, adjust the misc/psaux strings above accoringly. You'll then want to killall -HUP devfsd to get devfsd to reread /etc/devfsd.conf.

During installation the grub boot files are copied to /boot/grub (/boot/boot/grub in Gentoo Linux 1.0_rc5 and earlier.) Grub automatically looks in the /boot/grub directory on the boot partition. (We strongly recommend having a separate no-auto boot partition mounted at /boot, since that way it is much more difficult to clobber your kernel and boot info by accident.) The above error generally arises from (a) not using a separate boot partition, (b) forgetting to mount the boot partition at /boot before either unpacking the build snapshot or running emerge --usepkg system, or (c) forgetting the notail option when mounting a ReiserFS /boot partition. You can get more information on grub, including how to debug grub from the grub prompt, by reading the IBM developerWorks Grub tutorial.

Disable MPS 1.4 (multi-processor-system) in the BIOS or switch this function to 1.1. By using this option you just switch the MPS version. The Multi-Processor-System will still work properly. Make sure to boot Gentoo Linux with the following boot option, noapic.

In fact there is no difference between the 1.4 releases after they've installed. Gentoo 1.4 and later are glibc-2.3.x based. As such 1.4rc1 machine for example, that does emerge sync; emerge -u world is exactly the same as a machine with 1.4rc2 installed, after it does emerge sync; emerge -u world. The true differences lie in the installer.

You don't need to redo every step of the installation, but only the kernel-stuff and all associated steps. Suppose you have installed Gentoo on /dev/hda1 (/boot) and /dev/hda3 (/) with /dev/hda2 being the swap space:

Boot from the LiveCD and wait until you receive a prompt
We first mount all partitions:
# mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/gentoo
# mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/boot
# swapon /dev/hda2
# mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc
Then we chroot into our Gentoo environment and configure the kernel:
# chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash
# env-update && source /etc/profile
# cd /usr/src/linux
# make menuconfig
Now (de)select anything you have (de)selected wrongly at your
previous attempt. Then quit and compile your kernel:
# make dep && make bzImage modules modules_install
Now copy over your bzImage file, overwriting your previous one:
# cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot
If you use LILO, rerun lilo -- GRUB users should skip this:
# /sbin/lilo
Now exit the chroot and reboot.
# exit
# umount /mnt/gentoo/proc /mnt/gentoo/boot /mnt/gentoo
# reboot

If on the other hand the problem lays with your bootloader configuration, follow the same steps, but instead of configuring/compiling your kernel you should reconfigure your bootloader (recompilation isn't necessary).

When you have to download something using wget, use the following syntax to authenticate yourself:

# wget --proxy-user=username --proxy-passwd=password <url>

To have Portage automatically use this scheme, define it in /etc/make.conf:

FETCHCOMMAND="wget --proxy-user=username --proxy-passwd=password -t 5 --passive-ftp -P \${DISTDIR} \${URI}"
RESUMECOMMAND="/usr/bin/wget --proxy-user=username --proxy-passwd=password -c -t 5 --passive-ftp -P \${DISTDIR} \${URI}"

Sadly, rsync doesn't seem to support username/password authentication for proxies. See What if rsync doesn't work for me? for more information on how to handle this situation.

They exist in our portage tree as ebuild autobuild scripts; we are primarily a ports-based distribution, meaning that we provide scripts (.ebuild files) and a special system (Portage) so that you can build apps from sources. We generally only build binaries for releases and snapshots. The Development HOWTO covers the contents of an ebuild script in detail. For full binary ISO releases, we create a full suite of binary packages in an enhanced .tbz2 format (.tar.bz2 compatible with meta-information attached to the end of the file).

In one sentence, because Portage is much better in so many ways. One of the design philosophies of the .ebuild syntax was to make it an analog of what you'd type to install the program manually, thus making Portage very easy to learn and modify to your needs. We also have OpenBSD-style "fake" installs, safe unmerging, system profiles, package masking, a real dependency system, and lots of other good stuff.

Portage features the best of apt and ports; for example, USE options, a full dependency system, safe installs and uninstalls, and a true package database. Think of Portage as the best of both worlds; a ports system with the sensibilities and safety of a Linux package management system built-in.

The Portage User Guide details how to install and uninstall packages, and update Portage.

/etc/make.conf should be modified to override global and profile-specific default options used to compile and merge packages. The most common options are as follows:

As of Portage 1.5 onwards, /etc/make.defaults is antiquated; if you have portage-1.5-r1 or above installed then you can safely delete it. This file has been replaced by /etc/make.profile/make.defaults (/etc/make.profile should actually be a symlink to, /usr/portage/profiles/default), which contains system profile-specific default settings. The priority order of the various configuration files is as follows (highest first):

1. Environment variables
2. /etc/make.conf, for your use
3. /etc/make.profile/make.defaults, for profile-specific defaults
4. /etc/make.globals, for global defaults (settings not specified in any other place come from here)

YES! Type emerge --update system (use it with --pretend first) to update all core system packages, and use emerge --update world (again, use it with --pretend first) to do a complete system upgrade of all installed packages.

Portage now includes config file management support by default. Type emerge --help config for more details. The (overly) simple answer is that if a package installs foo somewhere under /etc, and another foo already exists there, then the new foo will instead be renamed to ._cfgxxxx_foo in that directory. A useful tool for examining and updating any protected config files is etc-update, which is now part of Portage.

Yes, but it is not trivial, and the next method only works when it is a simple ebuild (i.e. just ./configure and make && make install). Be sure to read the ebuild itself to see how Gentoo handles it.

Start with unpacking the ebuild: ebuild /usr/portage/<category>/<package>/<ebuild> unpack.

Next, go to /var/tmp/portage/<package>-<version>/work. Inside it you'll find the unpacked sources. Execute the steps you need to perform to configure and compile the package.

When finished, execute touch /var/tmp/portage/<package>-<version>/.compiled to trick Portage into thinking it configured and compiled the package. Then finish up with ebuild /usr/portage/<category>/<package>/<ebuild> merge.

If you're behind a firewall that doesn't permit rsync traffic, then you can use emerge-webrsync which will fetch and install a Portage snapshot for you through regular HTTP. emerge-webrsync uses wget to download, so proxy is fully supported.

# emerge-webrsync

If you cannot do this either, you can manually download a snapshot from http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/gentoo/snapshots/. In order to install the snapshot correctly, you first need to remove your current /usr/portage so that outdated ebuilds don't stay available on your system. However, you might want to put /usr/portage/distfiles somewhere safe if you don't want to lose all your sourcecode.

(First download the snapshot and place it in /usr)
# cd /usr
# mv /usr/portage/distfiles /usr/distfiles-temp
# rm -rf /usr/portage
# tar xvjf portage-foo.tbz2
# mv /usr/distfiles-temp /usr/portage/distfiles

Edit the PROXY settings in /etc/make.conf. If that doesn't work, edit /etc/wget/wgetrc and edit http_proxy and ftp_proxy appropriately.

There's a program called unison that works under both UNIX and Win32, available from http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/.

Definitely. You can run emerge --pretend package to see what programs are going to be installed. To find out the sources for those packages and where to download the sources from, you can run emerge -fp package. Download sources and bring them on any media home. Put the sources into /usr/portage/distfiles and run emerge package to see it picking up the sources you just brought in!

Yes, you can safely delete these files. But if you are on a slow connection, such as a modem, you might want to keep the archives if possible; often several ebuilds will be released for the same version of a specific piece of software - if you have deleted the archive and you upgrade the software it will have to be downloaded from the internet again.

Solution:

# emerge unmerge blackdown-jre blackdown-jdk   
# CONFIG_PROTECT="" emerge blackdown-jdk 

During compilation, Gentoo saves the sources of the package in /var/tmp/portage. It is safe to clean out all contents of this directory.

This is most probably because your user account doesn't have a valid shell specified. Check for your user entry in /etc/passwd and see if it ends in /bin/bash (or any other shell). If it doesn't, you must set a shell for the user. This is done using the usermod command, like this:

# usermod -s /bin/bash myuser

Your /tmp directory has the wrong permissions (it needs the sticky bit set). Type the following as root:

# chmod 1777 /tmp

Edit the KEYMAP variable in /etc/rc.conf. Then either reboot or restart the keymaps script: /etc/init.d/keymaps restart.

/etc/resolv.conf has the wrong permissions; chmod it as follows:

# chmod 0644 /etc/resolv.conf

You need to add --login to the first line in /opt/kde2.1/bin/startkde, so that it reads as follows:

#!/bin/sh --login

This fix has been added to recent versions of KDE.

You need to add that user to the cron group.

If you log on graphically, or want numlock to be activated when you issue startx, then you must emerge numlockx and add /usr/X11R6/bin/numlockx to /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc (for startx) or /etc/X11/Sessions/ (for any graphical login manager) such as /etc/X11/Sessions/Gnome for GDM.

If you work in commandline, you only need to rc-update add numlock default and numlock will be activated on the next reboot.

To have your terminal cleared, add clear to your ~/.bash_logout script:

$ echo clear >> ~/.bash_logout

If you want this to happen automatically when you add a new user, do the same for the /etc/skel/.bash_logout:

# echo clear >> /etc/skel/.bash_logout

If your ReiserFS partition is corrupt, try booting the Gentoo Linux boot CD and run reiserfsck --rebuild-tree on the corrupted filesystem. This should make the filesystem consistent again, although you may have lost some files or directories due to the corruption.

To view multilog (Gentoo Linux 1.0_rc5 and earlier) timestamps, you need to pipe the current log through the tai64nlocalcommand:

# tai64nlocal < /var/log/syslog.d/current | less

Or, alternatively, if you want to "tail" the log:

# tail -f /var/log/syslog.d/current | tai64nlocal

Metalog flushes output to the disk in blocks, so messages aren't immediately recorded into the system logs. If you are trying to debug a daemon, this performance-enhancing behavior is less than helpful. When your Gentoo Linux system is up and running, you can send metalog a USR1 signal to temporarily turn off this message buffering (meaning that tail -f /var/log/everything/current will now work in real time, as expected) and a USR2 signal to turn buffering back on again. If you want to disable buffering permanently, you can change METALOG_OPTS="-B" to METALOG_OPTS="-B -s" in /etc/conf.d/metalog.

To turn the buffering off:
# killall -USR1 metalog
To turn the buffering back on:
# killall -USR2 metalog

For bugs within a specific program, contact the program's author. Otherwise, use our Bugzilla bug tracker at http://bugs.gentoo.org. You can also visit us in #gentoo on the FreeNode IRC network.

New releases are announced on the gentoo-announce mailing list. In reality the packages themselves are updated shortly after the main authors release new code. As for when new Cd images etc are released, that tends to be whenever there are any major updates to the base code, or when new modules get added.

Head over to http://bugs.gentoo.org and submit a new bug of the type "ebuild". Attach your ebuild to the bug report.

Submit a new bug over at http://bugs.gentoo.org and add it to the "Docs-user" product, "Gentoo Linux FAQ" component.

Export WANT_AUTOMAKE_1_4=1 for all KDE projects before running make -f Makefile.cvs. Also, for KDE2 apps export WANT_AUTOCONF_2_1=1, and for KDE3 apps export WANT_AUTOCONF_2_5=1.

Console beeps can be turned off using setterm, like this:

# setterm -blength 0

If you would like to turn off the console beeps on boot you need to put this command in /etc/conf.d/local.start. However, this only disables beeps for the current terminal. To disable beeps for other terminals, pipe the command output to the target terminal, like this:

# setterm -blength 0 >/dev/vc/1

You need to replace /dev/vc/1 with the terminal you would like to disable console beeps for.

http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html

The official Gentoo documentation can be found on http://www.gentoo.org; general Linux information is at http://www.tldp.org.

Yes! LiveCDs for all supported architecture are available on our Gentoo Store. When you purchase a CD from our store, you are also supporting our development. So, please consider buying from our store if possible :-)

You can also find fresh CDs from Cheapbytes and tuxcds for a very good price. These people also bounce back a portion of the profits to the Gentoo project, so buy them while they are hot!

The mailing list administrators have decided to go with minimal munging (altering of mail headers), which means that they have decided against altering headers to have replies go to the mailing list. There are various reasons for this. For example, if a subscriber has a full mailbox, the entire list receives notice of this every time that something is posted.

Most GUI based mailers have a "reply to all" function. This will ensure that your reply goes to the mailing list as well as the original poster. Most users of text based emailers already know the methods to use, but if you don't, in Pine, there is a "reply to group" option. Setting Mutt to reply to the list is covered in the unofficial documentation at forums.gentoo.org.

Some list members do not like this method, but it was very heavily discussed when it went into effect, with arguments on both sides. Eventually the list administrators decided to keep it this way. Discussing it on the mailing list will sometimes bring a polite explanation and other times a rather brusque comment to check the archives. Although the administrators regret the inconvenience that it may cause some users, it is felt that at present it is preferable to the alternative for several reasons, many of these covered here.

(There are other eloquent arguments in favor of munging, and yes, the list administrators have seen them).

A good first step is to browse through the relevant documentation, failing that, the various Gentoo Linux mailing lists listed on Google. To search through the Gentoo mailing lists, just enter "lists.gentoo.org foo" to search for "foo". If all else fails, or you just want to hang out with Gentoo folks, visit us on irc: #gentoo on irc.freenode.net.